Wendell Steavenson’s book begins, unpromisingly, with the false juxtaposition of what she sees as two types of writing about past events: ‘analyzed narrative, neat and ordered’ – she gives as an example the causal history of revolutions she learned aged twelve – and the more chaotic, impressionistic account she ventures herself. ‘We can read words on a page that have been organized for us. But notice the volume of white space around the words. What is hiding in this white space? Half-considered tangents and impulses, groping comprehensions and misapprehensions … so much of history is hiding in the white spaces, dismissed as marginalia.’ Steavenson is also dismissive of explanatory ‘theory’, as well as of clear relations between cause and effect: 

Eighty million people and eighty million versions of a story … Life, bread, Egypt; but no truth, no answer to the question of why and how. ‘In Egypt,’ I said to Lina [a friend of Steavenson], ‘in Egypt,’ I said again, on the precipice of a grand generalization, and then